Family studies letter to son about going to war

Plea written in 1898 -- about another war -- sounds contemporary to some.

Plea written in 1898 -- about another war -- sounds contemporary to some.

May 08, 2006|GENE STOWE Tribune Correspondent

The son was considering going to war his patriotic duty. The father urged against it, pointing out that the country's "claim that it is a war for the sake of humanity is a hollow pretense," given the racial inequality, corporate greed and general immorality in the United States. "Your ambition is praiseworthy and I am as proud of you even for your will expressed, as if you had actually enlisted and covered yourself with the glory of having done your work faithfully and well," he wrote. "But don't enlist, because you would but serve, not the country, but her corrupt politicians; not the cause of humanity, not the cause of liberty, but the cause of hypocrisy and brutal power." The letter could have been written during the Vietnam conflict or maybe even in the current war in Iraq. But in this case, it happened during the Spanish-American War. William Loew, a lawyer in Chicago, wrote the letter to his son, Leopold, in New York City on June 8, 1898. Leopold's grandson, David Piser, of Mishawaka, and his wife, Dayle Brown, recently came across the handwritten letter and transcribed it. "The original letter is in our possession," David Piser says. "That was in some archives of the family that my wife has so diligently prepared." The text, on letterhead stationery laminated by someone long ago, covers two yellowed pages front and back in a curious script that calls for careful study. The Pisers received it in a box of keepsakes in 1998 and have recently started organizing the material. When they shared the letter with a brother and cousin in Philadelphia, a sister in the Boston area and a cousin in Chicago, they learned that another copy had circulated in the family. The 108-year-old advice rang strangely contemporary to all the readers. "I would have written the same letter to my son years ago," Piser says. "Everybody who's read it says, 'I would have written the same thing to my children.' I did say the same thing to my son, if he ever had to go to war -- not that I'm a pacifist, but when the war was as unjust as the Spanish-American War or the conflict we're in now is, I would tell them not to go." William Loew argued that the politicians' zeal for war against Spain on humanitarian grounds could not be supported in a land "where judges are drunkards and debauchers; a country in which, notwithstanding our much boasted American liberties, personal liberty is the most hollow mockery and pretense." He also pointed out that the Standard Oil Co. had refused to pay a tax for the war, demonstrating "the power and the influence of corporate bodies which overshadow and overawe the life of our governments." "With my Americanism of which I am proud, with my love to the contribution and the institutions of this country, I am afraid we are deceiving ourselves in claiming to be a civilized country with a noble mission to punish Spain for her cruelties in Cuba," he wrote. "A land -- oh, for the shame of it -- in which annually several hundred human beings are lynched is not a civilized state." The impassioned letter apparently moved Leopold, who was about 22 years old, to change his mind about enlisting. "It must have been the letter that changed his mind," says Piser. Leopold Loew later moved to South Bend, where he is buried.